[Uosenate] Fw: disquieted by faculty secret ad hoc committee

[Pedro Garcia-Caro]

Dear colleagues of the senate,

I just received the message below from our colleague David Hollenberg. Many other colleagues are asking questions and alarmed by the recent creation of a Task Force for Budget Reduction led by former and current senate leadership. We have only received confirmation of such a Task Force on August 14 within the Senate Budget Committee (SBC) and it was presented both as a "done deal" and as a more confidential and expeditious setting for the administration to conduct conversations with faculty representatives than the recently created Senate Budget Committee.

Several of us in the SBC and the CAS Caucus have been voicing concerns at every turn about the difference between informational (top-down) meetings with faculty representatives and a true consultation process of vetting and decision-making. We are hoping to hear more from President Mason about the works of the task force, especially as some of us have now heard from extra-official channels that the said task force may have been discontinued, making it the shortest-lived task force in our recent history.

Respectfully,
Pedro

Pedro García-Caro

Associate Professor of Spanish  | General Editor, Periphērica: a Journal of Social, Cultural, and Literary History<http://journals.oregondigital.org/index.php/peripherica/index> | Co-Editor, Journal of Academic Freedom<https://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/journal-academic-freedom>

Department of Romance Languages | School of Global Studies | (541) 513-8706 | http://rl.uoregon.edu/profile/pgcaro/

________________________________
From: David Hollenberg <dbh at uoregon.edu>
Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2025 09:48
To: Harinder Khalsa <harinder at uoregon.edu>; Pedro Garcia-Caro <pgcaro at uoregon.edu>
Subject: disquieted by faculty secret ad hoc committee

Dear Senators Khalsa and Garcia-Caro,

It has recently come to my attention that the Senate President has formed a secret, ad hoc committee the the administration claims to have been consulting regarding the elimination of departments and programs.  However, my department head was never consulted by this committee, but has been told that his unit would likely be eleminated.

That a secret committee which department heads and faculty was unaware seems to me the opposite of transparent consultation. Rather, it seems to reflect an attempt to keep the senate, the department heads, and the faculty unaware that decisions that would dictate the future of CAS were under way.

I urge you to act to intervene in this irregular use of the faculty senate, and to urge that the Senate President hault the use of this secret committee for this purpose.

Sincerely,
David Hollenberg






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David Hollenberg
Professor of Arabic & Islamic Studies
Susan Campbell Hall 349
Senior Research Fellow, UNESCO Crossings Institute https://unesco.uoregon.edu/
University of Oregon
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